Watching Her From The Bushes

July 20, 2011

When I was a kid, my mom and a family friend took me on vacation to the beach, where we stayed in this really old beach house for two weeks. Just walking in you could feel something, the atmosphere was so heavy and thick it was suffocating, like a sauna of bad emotions. For some reason we stayed anyway. Things moved on their own, went missing, and door and windows opened and closed by themselves. In one of the bedrooms you could hear a women crying at night, which got so bad that our family friend slept on the couch.

In the master bedroom, where my mom and I slept, you could feel someone watching you from the backyard. One night my mom woke up in the middle of the night and felt something drawing her onto the balcony, like she couldn’t stop herself. When she got outside, she saw a man standing in the bushes watching her. She ran from the room and ended up outside the room where the woman cried, where the window was wide open. Mom still says she felt so threatened in the moment that she still has nightmares about it.

Me, I heard voices the entire time I was there. Two of them, a man and a woman. I never understood what the man said because it was always a whisper, like someone talking to close to your ear, but he terrified me. The woman was better, she never talked to me. It seemed like she was talking to herself, like she was just going through the same days she had lived.

Turns out, one of the first inhabitants of the house had been murdered by a man who had stalked her, watching her through the windows and hiding in the bushes. One night he broke into the house and raped and killed her in the room where we heard the woman crying.

We didn’t find out until we went to return the key to the rental place. My mom asked the owner all sorts of questions, telling her all the things that had happened over those two weeks, but the lady wouldn’t tell us anything. It wasn’t until we gave up and went to our car that the owner’s daughter came out and told us the story.

It was the scariest shit I had ever witnessed, never had I been so glad a vacation was over.

There's a possibility all of these stories are the result of drugs, mental illness, physical illness, stress, sleep paralysis, dreams, or natural phenomena misidentified. That all of these stories are the result of the story teller lying or exaggerating.
But out of all the hundreds of stories here there is also the very real possibility that perhaps one is the absolute truth, that one has no other possible explanation other than the supernatural.
The question is, which story is it and what would that suggest about the universe.